Book Review by Translator

It is my privilege to have been asked to translate Seishiro Sugihara’s Questionof Guilt: Japan’s Foreign Ministry and Its War Responsibility from Japanese into
English. This is the first full length book to trace the incompetence and culpability ofJapan’s Foreign Ministry since its beginnings in the Meiji era. Although the Ministry
introduced an examination system in the 1870s based on models established inEurope and the United States to select and train staff, Sugihara shows how thisparadoxically produced a coterie of individuals dedicated to the pursuit of ministerialinterests over those of the Japanese people.
Most egregious of the Ministry’s blunders was its administrative mishandlingof the “final notice” to the United States that turned the Imperial Japanese Navy’s
surprise assault on Pearl Harbor into an unannounced “sneak attack,” and led to tragic
consequences for Japan. The author explains how this and other blunders were largely
due to the incompetence of Ministry staff, and to deeply flawed institutional,organizational, recruitment and training issues. He analyzes more recent bribery andembezzlement cases, and also shows how the Ministry has failed when reacting toexigent circumstances abroad such as efforts to evacuate Japanese nationals during
the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Critical of the Ministry’s attempts to enact internal
reforms, he makes recommendations to correct these flaws so that Japan may finallyconduct a decent and proper foreign policy that remains true to the national interest,
and to the people of Japan.
Conventional postwar multi-volume narratives of Japanese diplomacy havelargely portrayed the Foreign Ministry in a passive role during the events of the 1930s,
leading up to a war instigated exclusively by Japan’s two military services. This
paradigm has persisted and is perpetuated in treatments by insiders and former
diplomats, who largely take an uncritical approach to the Ministry’s actions in thepostwar era. Little has been made of the antiquated systems in place within theMinistry, some of which have remained unchanged since their introduction in theMeiji era, nor of the effect these structural and institutional problems have had on the
Ministry’s general performance. However, factional and policy disagreements overthe past decade have revealed unprecedented influence peddling and embezzlement
scandals, and triggered widespread scrutiny of the workings of the Foreign Ministryin greater detail than ever before.
In a welcome departure from such uncritical narratives, Sugihara has written1the first major work to examine the Foreign Ministry’s chronic weaknesses. He has
produced an unsanitized history of Japan’s diplomatic blunders and errors, from boththe turbulent decades leading up to war with the United States, and the postwar period
as Japan slowly reestablished its standing in the international community.
Sugihara has written extensively on the diplomatic history of Japan. Questionof Guilt can be viewed as the fourth volume of an unofficial “tetralogy” chronicling
the failings of the Foreign Ministry. The first book in this quartet is Japanese
Perspectives on Pearl Harbor (Asian Research Service, 1995), translated byTheodore McNelly, and is a survey of media reports around the time of the fiftiethanniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The second is Between Incompetence andCulpability: Assessing the Diplomacy of Japan’s Foreign Ministry from Pearl Harborto Potsdam (University Press of America, 1997) where he examined in detail thecircumstances surrounding the bungling by diplomats at Japan’s Washington embassyon the eve of war that inadvertently turned the Imperial Japanese Navy’s assault on
Pearl Harbor into a “sneak attack.” This led him to examine more closely theadministrative and political record of Japan’s Foreign Ministry in the postwar period
to determine how officials assessed, recorded, concealed, and begrudgingly
acknowledged their culpability for this egregious error. The third book of the series is
Chiune Sugihara and Japan’s Foreign Ministry (UPA, 2001) which championed thecauses of individuals such as Chiune Sugihara (unrelated to the author, Seishiro, byfamily or marriage) and Naoya Nakano, two Ministry employees who followed theirconsciences to uphold the national interest over the narrower interests of the Foreign
Ministry, and were subsequently ostracized for their “insubordination.” He ties allthese threads together in Question of Guilt (the final volume in this tetralogy) to
produce an unprecedented survey of the failings of the Foreign Ministry, since its
beginnings in the Meiji period to the present day, and offers alternatives for futurereforms.
Sugihara has also written extensively on the Japanese education system, andthe significance of the Fundamental Law of Education, the emperor system, and theseparation of church and state in Japan. His work on jurisprudence, religious
education, and historiography in pedagogical studies was recognized by the Japan
Buddhist Education Association in 1998. He was appointed president of the JapaneseSociety for History Textbook Reform in 2011, and has recently shepherded a new
middle school textbook through the complicated authorization process, a book that
deals with these complex and controversial wartime, foreign policy and diplomatic
issues in a frank and principled manner. He is dedicated to the cause of overcoming2the tragic consequences of the war between Japan and the United States, anddemonstrates how, even in our fractious and turbulent world, erstwhile foes canindeed come together as true friends and allies.

Norman Hu
Translator
November 20163